How to fund the NHS

Abstract

The questions about the NHS's sustainability are centred on its financial viability. While there are many dimensions to this debate, a taxation-based system remains under scrutiny. Twenty years ago, a senior economist at the World Bank told me that our tax-based model was unsustainable. Most health systems were funded by insurance schemes, and it was a matter of when, not if, the NHS would follow suit. This year, a German policy maker explained to me that Germany-maintained funding increases in its health system during the financial crisis because the funding model was diverse; in other words not solely reliant on taxation. Enter Mahiben Maruthappu and Dominic Marshall to help analyse the various funding options for the NHS. 1 Their argument is that there are three possible futures for the NHS. First, in the absence of new money, productivity must be stepped up. Alternatively, public funding might be released for the NHS by reallocation of funds from other sectors, by raising national insurance or introducing a hypothecated tax. The third model is privatised medical insurance. More funding will only arise from political action, and while this crisis might seem unprecedented, the authors remind us that sharp political intervention was also required in

All-flavor Multi-Channel Analysis of the Astrophysical Neutrino Spectrum with IceCube

“…With the successful 5 observation of a diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos, both in the form of events starting within 6 a fiducial volume of a detector [2,5] and events with Earth-crossing directions [3], a major goal is 7 now to determine the properties of this flux in the greatest possible detail. This can be pursued both 8 by extending the selection of neutrino candidate events to capture as many astrophysical neutrinos 9 as possible, including substantial numbers of atmospheric neutrinos to ensure that backgrounds are 10 well understood, and by combining different selection techniques into more thoroughly integrated 11 analyses of the total spectrum.…”

“…No prior is 84 placed on the normalization of the conventional component as it is expected to be well constrained 85 by the data, the prompt component is given a gaussian prior centered at zero with a width of 2.3 86 times the ERS model normalization [6] following the result obtained in [7], and the penetrating 87 muons are given a prior centered at the rate estimated from a tagged sample of experimental back-88 ground events with a width of 50% [2]. These priors are expected to have only weak influence on 89 the final result.…”